


Collateral Damage

by SnailArmy



Category: Our Fair City (Podcast)
Genre: for all you know this could be canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-14
Updated: 2016-02-14
Packaged: 2018-05-20 12:09:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,630
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6005374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SnailArmy/pseuds/SnailArmy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Short one-shot fic, involving mold, dogs, unfortunate assignments, and shenanigans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Collateral Damage

**Author's Note:**

> This was done for school, so there's a lot of contextualization. Also, little effort was put into it. Enjoy!

Policy Alpha 76752A, simply known as Ann, thought of herself as a hardworking and loyal employee of Hartlife. She finished her assignments on time, prayed to the Founders daily, and never associated with molepeople unless absolutely necessary, as any good policy should. So why, she thought, should she have been sent on such a dangerous errand?  
It could have been assigned to Jeremy, who just last week disobeyed a direct order from management. It could have been Susan, who has been consistently underperforming. Why did she, of all people, have to be sent to Old Tunnel? That was where carnivorous mold lived- well, may or may not live. Officially, the Company neither confirmed nor denied- was that growling? Ann picked up the pace. 

She thought about something to comfort herself. It could be worse, she reasoned. She could be Outside. The Outside is cold, and full of wolves. She would not survive Outside. That was why Hartlife was founded, on the first Exclusion Day so many fiscal cycles ago. To protect hard-working policies like herself from outside thought and ideas. Ann remembered the most recent Exclusion Day. All the “Keep Out” signs glowing throughout the tunnels, and the doorways festively boarded up. She had eaten the traditional feast of algae bars with her family, which differed from their regular meals of algae bars in quantity and flavor. It was enough to keep her happy. 

A steady plunk, plunk rang through the musty space as water dripped from a leaky pipe onto the dilapidated cobblestone of the tunnel. Old Tunnel, as its name would suggest, was one of the oldest tunnels in Hartlife. As the tunnels went further and further down, they became more recent as progress spiraled ever downward, encompassing all the things a tunnel-dwelling policy would need. Places of employment, resource distribution centers, people movers, and even entertainment facilities littered the streets of Hartlife. Ann’s personal favorite was Al’s Bar, a particularly shady establishment where the waitstaff kept their questions to themselves and the coffee flowing. 

Just up ahead was a small electric bulb, shedding light on a wooden door set into the dirt wall of the tunnel. As she approached, she could read the sign: The Dr. Montgomery Moro Museum and Memorial House, with a piece of paper taped to the bottom adding “and Lab!” with a… smiley face? Ann paused before entering. History was dangerous, and science more so. She lamented again her assignment, and pushed open the door. 

The scene that greeted her was one of chaos, science, and everything that defied the Company. There were glass containers of all shapes and sizes, filled with various colors of liquid- a lot of them looked suspiciously like blood. Two men were chasing a large, hairy creature around the room as a woman in a lab coat shouted at them from the corner. Through an open doorway she could see a large glass tank that held yet another man, frozen in a strange solution but still shouting in a robotic monotone from some sort of speaker. In her shock the furry creature, who looked sort of like a mole but not really, slipped between her legs and was out the door and into the tunnels. 

The first of the men, scrawny and blonde, attempted to dive for the shaggy animal but tripped over a chair and knocked over a shelf of jars, several of which shattered and spilled their contents onto the tile floor. He laid there for a moment, defeated, before beginning to collect the unbroken jars. 

“There, there, Andrew, you’ll get them next time,” the second man said, patting the clumsy one- Andrew- on the shoulder, but offering no real help. The first thing Ann noticed about him was that he was tall, significantly taller than anyone else she’d seen in the tunnels. The second thing she noticed was that not all his skin seemed to be the same color. Not like the tan lines she’d seen on the lightning riggers in Al’s Bar, but as if it had come from different sources entirely. Before she could finish that thought, however, the woman in the lab coat was shouting. 

“What are you doing here?! West! What is she doing here!? If this is another unemployed policy come here looking for handouts, tell her we’re closed! Also, stop inviting unemployed policies to the lab!” The woman was of average height, for the tunnels, and her raven-black hair pulled into a clinically neat ponytail contrasted starkly with her white lab coat.  
The tall one ignored her, opting instead to stride confidently over and heartily shake poor Ann's hand. 

“Welcome to the Montgomery Moro Museum and Memorial House! Have you come for a tour? I am Doctor Herbert West, but you can call me Herbert.” He still hadn’t stopped shaking her hand. “Through that door there in the sitting room is the legendary Doctor Moro himself, cryogenically frozen! That in the corner is Doctor Emily Caligari, and on the floor is my assistant Andrew Snidge. He does his best, the poor boy. And you are…?”

Ann took a moment to process the information, running over the names in her head, and pulled the envelope she was sent to deliver from her bag. “I have a message,” she stuttered, “from the company.”

“Is that all?” West picked up the envelope and threw it disinterestedly into a pile of similar-looking envelopes on a nearby counter. “Well, then, we’d better get going. Come along, we can’t have poor Hercules running amuck in the tunnels, unsupervised.” 

“Hercules?”

“The dog- ran out the door just as you came in? You are going to help us find it, aren’t you?” So that’s what that thing was. A dog. 

Dr. Caligari walked over to the counter now, picking up the most recent envelope and turning it over in her hands a bit, but not opening it. “She’ll only slow us down, West. Let her go back to her office.” She set the envelope down and began rummaging in a closet.

Ann would gladly have agreed with her, but West was already ushering her out the door and Snidge had grabbed some sort of remote tracking device that was beeping quite obnoxiously, and Caligari was following reluctantly, with some kind of sciencey-looking gun in her hands. The less-than-enthusiastic scientist strode to the front alongside Dr. West, leaving Ann keeping a breathless pace beside Snidge. Though her mind was still reeling, and Herbert’s long legs set an uncomfortably brisk speed, she found herself asking questions of the less-than-graceful assistant. 

“Why are we running?”

“We grew a dog in the lab, but she got loose just as you came in.” He took her questions easily in stride, as it were. It was clear he was used to explaining the doctors’ work to the unacquainted. 

“Where did you get a dog in the first place?”

“We borrowed some DNA samples from Emerson- this dog we know. We were messing with the genome, we thought… well, I’m not really sure what Dr. West was trying to do, but I think it worked.” 

“Speaking of, what is that guy’s deal, anyway?” They rounded a corner. Herbert was telling Caligari how the dog should still be on this floor, as long as it hadn’t been eaten by mold. 

“Oh, Doctor West? He’s not from here. I know, I know, Outsiders are to be shunned and feared, but he has a lot of good ideas. Also a lot of very very bad ideas, but he helped with the nuclear reactor that powers the city, at least. Remember that whole Woken debacle a few months ago? Yeah, that was also him. He’s a reanimator- he brings back dead people. Like my mom.”

“Your mom died?” The tunnel they had been running down was a dead end, and the group turned back. 

“No, I mean, well, yes, but Elizabeth isn’t really my mom. She just lets me call her that.”

They hurried along in comfortable science for a little bit. A sharp, unfamiliar sound rang through the halls from some distance- was that the dog? The bark rang out two or three more times, louder each time, until there was a terrible mix of squealing and crunching and growling, until only the growling remained. 

“Well, there goes that little experiment.” Caligari growled, turning back. “For the record, this was a colossal waste of time.” 

“There there, Emily,” The reanimator replied. “We’ll get them next time. Might as well head back to the lab.” 

Herbert led back towards the way they had originally come, already prattling about his next experiment, leaving Ann alone with Andrew for a moment. 

“You’d better head back,” she said. “I’ve got to get home- I’ve been here too long already.”

“Come on down again, if you get the chance.” He looked her in the eyes for a moment, then turned away sheepishly. “Bye.” He turned and sprinted away to catch up with the doctors. 

Ann hesitated for a moment. Could she go back to office life, now that she had seen what lie outside it? She shook her head. The company was where she- where everyone- belonged. They seemed happy, but Hartlife was all the life you could ever need. She stood at a tunnel crossroads, pondering. 

 

M.U.R.D.E.R. Special Agent George Chamberlain pressed the button on his tape recorder. It was old-fashioned, perhaps, but he was an old-fashioned man. 

“Policy is within range. Alpha 76752A has been participating in illegal science and free thought, and as such is scheduled for premature termination.” He may not have been able to get Emily Caligari, now that she was working for the company again, but he needed something to keep him busy. 

He released the button, and squeezed the trigger.


End file.
